3D"NWAnews.com 3D"Arkansas

Arkansan to auction ’71 skyjack ransom

BY RODNEY BOWERS=

Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2006

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/145541/

MENA — The finder of= the only cash ever recovered in the celebrated D. B. Cooper skyjacking has deci= ded, after 26 years, to part with some of the frayed $20 bills.

It’s time to make a sale, says Brian Ingram, no= w 34 and with a wife and three children.

“I want to invest for our future,” he sai= d of the money he hopes to reap from the sale of the recovered bills, which he’s kept locked in a bank safe deposit box in recent years.

Ingram was 8 when he found the booty beneath the sand= along a riverbank in Washington state.

His present-day attorney, Danny = Thrailkill, also of Mena, said he was working with Sotheby’s auction house in New York to have= the bills valued and possibly sold, although Ingram plans to keep an untold num= ber of the 17 bills that remain nearly intact. Ingram also will hold onto 11 ha= lves and hundreds of shards, at least for now.

Neither Ingram nor Thrailkill professed to know what an auction might bring. They noted, however, that a former FBI agent, Ralph P. Himmelsbach, wrote in his book, Norjak : The Investigation of D. B. Cooper= , that an offer of $ 20, 000 was made for one of the $ 20 bills just weeks after t= hey were found.

(Norjak is the FBI code n= ame for the investigation of the 1971 skyjacking of a Northwest Orient Airline̵= 7;s Boeing 727 ).

Although Thrailkill said Sotheby’s had requested photographs of the bills, Lauren Gioia, a company spokesman, said the company would be unable to assign a value without first observing and authenticating them, a= nd then researching similar past sales.

Ingram said he found the money Feb. 10, 1980, while o= n a family outing near his home in Vancouver, = Wash., just across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore.

“It was late in the evening and it started gett= ing cold,” Ingram, who is now a carpenter, recounted in an interview Feb.= 1 at Thrailkill’s office in Mena.

As he raked sand to build a fire about 20 to 30 feet = from the river, a tattered $ 20 bill appeared. Then, three bundles of bills “with rubber bands still on them” came to the surface.

In all, he said, his find totaled $ 5, 880.

“At the time, it was, ‘Wow! This is nice, ’” Ingram said of finding the buried loot.

His father, Dwayne Ingram, contacted the local police= and was asked to supply a few of the bills’ serial numbers, which were fed into a computer.

“It hit on the Cooper case,” Brian Ingram= said, noting that at the time he knew nothing of the skyjacking that had occurred more than eight years earlier.

Local police instructed the Ingrams to contact the FB= I in Seattle, which was leading the investigation. The federal agents, in turn, told the Ingrams th= ey would have to part with the money.

“The FBI’s claim was that if they ever ca= ught D. B. Cooper, they needed the bills to prosecute him,” Ingram said. <= /p>

His parents hired an attorney, who waged a six-year b= attle with the government in federal court to have the money returned. Those legal efforts bore fruit in 1986.

“The FBI kept 13 or 14 [bills ] for evidence,&#= 8221; Ingram said, noting that the remainder was divided between himself and a representative of Northwest’s insurer, Globe Indemnity Co., which lat= er merged with Royal Insurance, and then with Royal & Sun Alliance of Charlotte, N. C.

“It was a ‘your turn, my turn,’ tha= t sort of thing,” he explained of the process of dividing the money.

Out of roughly 140 bills, Ingram now has the 17 nearly intact $ 20 bills that bear serial numbers matching an FBI list of the rans= om money, along with the halves and shards. Several bills were destroyed in an attempt to separate them when the money was split with the insurance compan= y, and several more went to the family lawyer. Thrailkill= said he has been told the lawyer got 15 bills, but “gave some to frie= nds and family” over the years, keeping only a few for hi= mself.

THE TALE OF = D. B. COOPER

Through the years, the case, popularized by the 1981 = movie The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper, starr= ing Robert Duvall and Treat Williams, has been cloaked in mystery. Based on a compilation of news accounts, here’s what happened:

About 2 p. m. on Nov. 24, 1971 a white man, believed = to be in his mid-40 s, arrived at the Portland a= irport to buy a ticket for Northwest Orient Flight 305, departing at 4 : 35 p. m. for Seattle. He was dressed in a black suit with a white shirt, narrow black tie and dark overcoat. He carried a dark briefcase.

The man, who identified himself as Dan Cooper, boarde= d the plane with 35 other passengers and six crew members, and took a seat near t= he rear. Ten minutes into the flight, he handed a flight attendant a note, whi= ch she failed to read, believing the man was flirting with her.

A few minutes later, he got the flight attendant̵= 7;s attention, and said, “Miss, you better read that note.... I have a bo= mb.”

The message was relayed to the cockpit and a pilot ca= me out and sat next to Cooper.

“So what’s all this about a bomb?” = the pilot asked.

Cooper opened his briefcase and revealed some red cyl= inders and wires.

The pilot returned to the cockpit and radioed an airl= ine spokesman, who told him to give the man whatever he wanted.

Cooper demanded $ 200, 000, all in $ 20 bills, and fo= ur parachutes, which he wanted delivered at McChord= Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash., where the plane stopped at 5:45= p. m.

After allowing the passengers and two crew members to depart, Cooper and the plane climbed back into the air at 7 : 45 p. m., headed for a refueling stop in Reno, Nev., and on to Mexico.

Cooper instructed the pilot to fly no higher than 10,= 000 feet and no faster than 150 knots, or 172. 5 mph.

At 8 : 12 p. m., the pilot= noticed the back-door light indicator was on, and called out, “Do you need so= me help back there ?”

Cooper responded: “No.”

Cooper, who had strapped parachutes to his back and c= hest, and tied the money to his waist, then stepped into the minus 7-degree freez= ing rain somewhere over Washington’s C= owlitz or Clark counties.

Authorities say he was never heard from again.

The Columbian newspaper in Clark County, Wash., in a 1996 article, quoted Himmelsbach, the FBI agent who chased Cooper until retirement in 1980, as saying that Cooper probably was an outcast who died = with his money in the wilderness.

“[Cooper ] was very = likely an ex-con who was going to make one last desperate go for the big one,̶= 1; Himmelsbach told the newspaper. “If he made it, f= ine. If not, he probably felt he had very little to lose.”

Himmelsbach said Cooper’s finale probably wasn’t glorious or romantic, that he likely was injured in the parach= ute jump and died. The jumper later became known as D. B. Cooper after authorit= ies leaked to the press that they were questioning a Portland man named Daniel B. Cooper, wh= o went by his initials, according to news accounts. That man was cleared, but the = name stuck with the skyjacker.

KEEPING SILE= NT

Today, the FBI still declines to discuss the D. B. Co= oper case publicly. “This case is open and it probably will be until it is solved, so it limits us to what can be said,” Special Agent Robbie Burroughs of the Seattle FBI office said Feb. 1.

Ingram’s riverbank discovery reportedly remains= the only evidence of the crime ever found.

Libby McLaughlin, a Royal & Sun Alliance spokesma= n in Charlotte, said s= he had “no knowledge of what happened to the money” that was allocated= to Globe Indemnity, noting that many of its handlers have since retired or gon= e on to other jobs.

Ingram’s attorney, Thrailk= ill, said there was no record of any of Globe’s stash ever being sold and = that none of Cooper’s other money has ever surfaced.

Ingram said his discovery triggered an immediate onsl= aught of media attention.

Pointing to a photograph of himself as a youngster, I= ngram said, “I wasn’t, as you can see, a great-looking kid, but sudde= nly I sure had a lot of girlfriends.”

Ingram said the attention did not die down until his = family moved to Oklahoma= when he was 13.

Over the years, Ingram shied away from telling people= that he was the one who found Cooper’s money, and only seldom revealed any= of the bills.

“It was like, ‘Yeah, right, ’”= ; he said of reactions to his finding the money.

Ingram said he even waited six years into his 12-year relationship with his wife before he told her.

Ingram served a three year stint with the Army after = high school, as a medic for an airborne division. He moved to Mena about 12 years ago after completing his military obligation.

He said he hoped to invest whatever he gets from the = sale of the Cooper cash.

But he still has butterflies about parting with his treasure.

“I know I sure did last night,” he said d= uring the interview.

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